The chance of IHC procs should be 45% on a critical flash/gheal/binding heal. So if your crit chance was 10%, % to proc IHC is 4,5%. With 15% crit it goes up to 6,75% and at 20% crit 9% chance to proc IHC.

~5-6% chance to proc on a spellcast sounds around the same as what it's on live. And on Live servers I've had several situations where Clearcasting has procced only once (or zero times) during a boss fight full of GHeal spamming. M'uru Void Sentinel healing as example. One, two or three manapools without a Clearcast proc sounds normal on live On other hand, in a normal raid encounter few manapools is nothing.

If you want to compare it to live, you cant add Imp Holy Conc since that is 3 more talents points to invest. Holy conc without the imp talents is 30%. Meaning you would have to have 20% crit to get the 6% we currently get from Holy Conc.
Looks like Holy Conc and imp Holy conc are talents for the future, it is balanced for the gear we get in wotlk which as it looks now has a lot more crit then we see on healing gear in BC.

i will not specc for Holy Conc and imp Holy Conc, before we enter Wotlk.

For raid healing I would use this spec:

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?prie...00000000000000

Focusing on AoE healing, where crits with CoH proc SoL, which gives free flash heals again (50% chance). Even with the low amount of crit priests have, around 17-18% raid buffed, a CoH hitting 6 people will almost always crit once. So a CoH-CoH-free instant flash heal rotation seems quite good for raid healing.

On an other note: Don't you priest find Serendipity ridiculous good ? 25% of mana returned (on Greater Heal and Flash heal) if there is overhealing, for tank healing such a talent is more efficient then the whole crit based mana regeneration system offered by Illuminantion, Improved Water shield and Holy concentration.

Also, do priests really need 3 mana regeneration systems ? Spirit+meditation, Holy concentration+crit and Serendipity ? Seems a bit overkill to me (as shaman who have to do with the incredible weak and annoying Improved Water Shield system)

That nerf was to be expected, with talents (+10% int (I am shaman)) and BoK the amount of mp5 from Int would be more then from pure mp5. A 20 Int gem gave 9mp5 on a 2,5%/5sec base, 1,5mp5 with Mana tide, 12,5 crit rating (100 int=1% crit = 52 crit rating), 3 healingpower (15% int -> healingpower) and of course the raw mana which can be seen as mp5 again, going down as fights get longer (3mp5 on a 10min fight).

Where other gems give 8 mp5, 20 crit rating or 23 spellpower, the Int Gave some of it all, going up to 50+ item budget points.

Agreed! I just wondered if someone had done some proper comparing. Im at work now so i cant do it.

It depends which way you look at it. Obviously it's powerful to get a 25% reduction, but for priests the downranking elimination is going to cause tons more overhealing most likely (I believe this is the case for Paladins/Shamans as well, whereas Druids don't get hit as hard by it), so compared to the current situation we might still lose efficiency. Basically as an example, when I now have a 3k health deficit on a target which is in no huge danger of dying, I'd use a Greater Heal rank 1, which would cost me 315 mana to fill the person up to full. (Equipping the T5 set bonus would reduce this cost to 215 mana, but I'd say it might be a bit overpowered for this purpose, which is why Serendipity will be a % instead of a flat value). With downranking gone, I now get the following options instead:
-Greater Heal. Will most certainly overheal a ton, costing me 701 mana iirc, modified by Serendipity to be 526 mana. Could be knocked down to 426 mana if using T5 bonus, but obviously a huge increase in mana cost compared to what it is now.
-Flash Heal. 470 mana without anything affecting it, 353 mana with Serendipity. Including the new glyph, it will be 423 and 318.
-Renew. 405 mana talented, and takes a while to apply.

When figuring in Serendipity, we will about break even when excluding the T5 bonus between now using GHeal to fill up people, and Flash Heal to do the same in the new scenario, including Glyphs in the equation. Obviously the talent will be nicely powerful when it procs on a GHeal which just fills up the MT, but overall it mostly feels like a crutch to offset the issues we have from downranking. The inability to fit heals to the situation as well as before (using various ranks of flash heal) means that our overhealing will go up and our efficiency without Serendipity goes down; the talent seems to mostly compensate for this.

For the future, I see two scenarios of how powerful the spell is:
-We end up with the current skillset, no downranking possible. Overheal goes way up, and Serendipity merely compensates for this loss with its mana return.
-We end up getting the suggested fairly slow heal of medium strength and comparable efficiency to max rank GHeal (Basically getting a set of healspells to cover the ranges of healing deficits like we do now with most priests using 3-4 ranks of GHeal, but without the potential efficiency gain at GHeal 1 from the downranking). We are then able again to select our heals to fit the health deficit again, meaning we can work on lowering our overhealing while filling the target (something most people would consider 'good' healing. In this case for skillfull priests, it's going to be a near 25% reduction in mana consumption. Which is indeed very powerful for 3 points, and we'd likely see it nerfed badly with Koraa making another post on how this talent was overbudget. (Not that I'd disagree with a bit of balancing in this case maybe, but DW Spec for Rogues and Nature's Reach for Druids are very impressive in what they managed to fit into the same budget =P)

It all depends on the availability of smaller heals in my opinion. If the gaping hole left by the downranking elimination gets filled it will be highly powerful, if not it looks like a crutch to compensate for the efficiency loss for this. Actually doing these calculations kinda depresses me, since the numbers I get seem to suggest Blizzard expects us to just use Flash Heal, sink some points in Serendipity and be fine...

Regarding the mana regen systems, I personally don't mind the situation, since it offers more possibilities of skill to be used to get optimal results, juggling clearcasting into OO5SR time to get more regeneration, fitting heals so overheal is minimized and efficiency maximized (if they let us) with Serendipity, using Inner Focus to help in this. It's one of the more fun aspects of Priest healing in my views, though obviously the whole thing needs to be balanced in total. However given the only addition is Serendipity (which is essentially a passive which will normally not affect the behavious of a 'good' healer), I don't see major issues there. I wouldn't oppose other classes getting systems less resistant on procs as well though, rather than having Paladins being forced to pray for crits and seeing their manapool drain rapidly if the random number generator does not cooperate.

Finally, the replenishment nerf was to be expected I guess. Going by Constantius' numbers, a regeneration of 450 mp5 would be highly normal for casters. This would be of such a high magnitude in terms of both item budget involved, as well as cause issues in boss encounter design. Blizzard would be forced to design bosses around Replenishment (as the amount of regen gained from it, or the increase in power by being able to drop such an amount of regen from gear would be absolutely huge), which would cause issues in especially 10 mans I think. Getting 2 Replenishment classes in 25 mans should be fine, but getting 1 in 10 mans could cause problems, if those specs happen to be rare, and would block raids completely from doing content if it was properly tuned. A return of 225 mp5 still seems a bit high, and still has me wonder if they should not make mana regen a bit more of a personal issue, rather than something where many people depend on one or two persons to keep their manapool in order.


Finally, I am personally not happy entirely with (I)HC yet. I welcome the change of it scaling with crit, especially with the tons of crit we seem to be getting. However two issues I see:
-It needs to be a separate roll, as detailed before. Two rolls seems a bit too random for my liking, on top of which critting and clearcasting at the same time isn't always the most convenient situation.
-I feel the break even point should be lower. Sure, in WotLk we will be reaching the 20% crit fairly easily possibly, with all the crit on our gear. However, without this gear I don't think I'm currently anywhere close to 20% crit (also in raids), which basically means that the talent is even weaker than the previous patch, which we found a bit underpowered already. And yeah, at lvl 80 we will have 20% crit with gear, but that crit rating on the gear still comes at a cost of other stats which the item budget could have been used on. I'd personally find a break even point of 15% more realistic, although in this case some balancing on the scaling formula would have to be done so going up to 30% crit (who knows how possible this is, I won't exclude the possibility) would not boost us up to 18% clearcasting.

I also find the situation with both Clearcast and Surge of Light being ~50% procs (45 in case of IHC) of a crit to be a bad situation. We get a bit too reliant on crits in this situation I feel, with the way the random number generator can work and both these abilities requiring two rolls. One of them granting an instant free flash heal and one the hasted heals, one of which free seems a bit high amount of procs at the same time when we crit, not too mention that we can expect with near certainty that there's going to be issues of both proc getting eaten by a single spell. (As mentioned before, you can't do the Flash Heal as first spell since it eats the clearcast proc most likely, you don't really want it as second spell either since you waste the haste, but casting a non-free GHeal in between screws up the OO5SR period) I don't think having Surge of Light proccing on crit is a bad thing (I still dislike dual roll needed for it though), but this makes it pretty clear IHC would be better off not being linked to actual crits occurring.

If you spec Holy Spec (5% crit), then have an elemental shaman or moonkin druid in the raid (another 5%), with raid buffed intellect values you shouldn't be far off the break point.

Also remember that current spell damage gear will become healing gear as soon as the 3.0.2 patch comes. You may be able to pick up some crit pieces that are still good for healing with the knowledge of what they'll become in 3.0.2.
See: this list
Ironically, many of the T4/5/6 damage items are actually quite nice (those that don't contain hit).

Sarjin don't forget that the main difference is that SoL will actually be affected by a glyphed 6-man CoH. Add that binding heal has two chances to crit in one spell and that it's a pretty common spell to use coupled with all raid buffs and crit seems very valuable to me. I'm alot happier that the talent scales with gear than not... it also adds another stat to be useful for us priests which for me is very exciting when choosing gear and yellow sockets. On top of that it also adds a little extra flavour to intellect.

My biggest issue at the moment with the holy tree is that we have so many talents and still are forced to go down 13 (most people will go 14) points down the discipline tree. It's actually not optional at all, it's a MUST have talent for every single holy priest out there and with all the goodie talents in holy after the latest patch you're going to miss on one of the higher talents.

The suggestion would be to swap places with inspiration and meditation (might anger the pvp priests), or just make meditation a baseline ability? I mean priests are the class that are descripted as being the one class that gains the most from spirit?

I think part of the point of changing Crit to a mana regen ability (see: SoL, Holy Conc (+Improved), Serendipity (more likely to proc off crits due to overheal)) is to remove the dependency on Meditation/Inner Focus, or at least provide a choice between the two. They're doing the same to other talent trees too, with putting beneficial talents for Resto druids at the top of Balance (in the past resto builds have been based on dumping all points in the resto tree for PvE).

Two things:

1.) I thought about it, and since talents appear to have a budget, shouldn't Holy Specialization just be 5% to crit, flat (and not holy only), compare it to warrior Cruelty.

2.) After thinking a little, with 20-45% crit rate, has anyone modeled or considered Imp. Spirit Tap? I figure on average 20% crit is 1/5 chance. So using shadow word: death, we should average 1 imp. spirit tap proc per a minute (which, if specced, would also proc surge of light). 20% combat regen and 20% more spirit. Now, imagine combining this without +Spirit trinkets and Inner Focus (iirc, I saw one on MMO-C 84 spirit passive, +386 or something on-use, and we still have our earrings).

From a regen POV this wouldn't be too shabby actually:

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?prie...00000000000000

I agree for the most part, and am glad we will scale of crit to a decent extent now, with them avoiding higher crit bonuses which would largely be wasted to overheal in most situations. (As you aim for filling up the target when not critting, typically) Given the way item budget works and the way they want gear to be as generally attractive as they can (aside from hit rating, which is never going to be solved unless they add a highly artificial talent or mechanic to convert it into another stat for healers, such as hit->crit), having priests scale of multiple stats is a good thing. With a bit of tweaking it's quite a good concept, though I feel that the period before WotLK hits might be a bit painful with our clearcasting going down a bit. It's no more than collateral damage to the main objective I guess (balance at level 80), but it might still be a bit annoying for a short while. At 80, it seems getting 5-10 % crit from gear is going to be pretty easy, so we will probably typically be in the 20-25% crit range then, if not more. At that rate, we are indeed going to proc Surge of Light a ton when using CoH, which will make it pretty valuable I think. I do think they need to figure out a way to not have Surge of Light and IHC work against each other. If they manage it technically so that the free Flash Heal does not consume anything from IHC, it should be fine. You get to use the Flash, then wait a few seconds and can drop your big hasted free heal somewhere, leaving one charge for burst healing or deciding to regen some, based on the situation. However given how talents have interfered in the past, this might not be something they manage to pull off. In case this doesn't work, I think separating IHC from the actual critting (giving you a chance of 45% of your holy critrate to clearcast on the spells involved) would be best, because in this case procs at the same time would be pure coincidental and not something happening all the time.

I personally very much agree with Meditation, for some obvious reasons which have been raised tons of time everywhere:
-We are supposed to be the Spirit class, yet out of all cloth classes are now the only one without any sort of regen while casting as baseline.
-It's a required talent which pretty much any sane priest of any spec has to take. It doesn't get any more required than that, and talents have been made baseline for less.
-It severely limits spec flexibility since everybody needs Disc at least as secondary spec, basically killing any remote potential for for instance Holy/Shadow builds (if the talents were laid out so Shadow talents low down would strengthen Holy and such)

Looking at the Holy/Disc talent trees, they just feel like they are stuck in the past, and haven't at all be revamped to reflect some of Blizzard's newer design philosophies:
-Lack of universally useful talents in the lower end of the tree. Dual Wield spec/Relentless Strikes/Malice for rogues in comparison, offers nice benefits which any spec will want to get. Looking at this, Meditation if they want us to spec talents on it and increase flexibility would be a prime candidate for this position. The only talent which is really somewhat universally useful is Twin Disciplines, though since the nerf it kind of pales compared to the rogue counterparts.
-Talents are boring. Especially looking at Holy, the tree is the schoolbook example of a collection of % increases, whereas the Druid trees for instance have talents with more interesting effects such as power returns and Living Seed. Nothing game changing in Holy either sadly.
-Too many 5 point talents. We still have a huge load of 5 point talents where a lot of counterpart talents have been reduced to 3 point talents of similar or even slightly more powerful effects. Mages get 100% crit strike bonus for both Frost and Fire (well, Ignite is slightly more actually) for 3 points each, Shadow Priests have to spend 5 points for this much deeper in the tree. Makes for lots of lost points on the way.
-Too many talents which are highly specific and should be combined. For example Improved Shield and Improved Fortitude, to give an example. Most talents give single effects, whereas many other talents from other classes have been combined.
-No synergy whatsoever between most talents. Druids have much better synergy where talents fit a common theme, whereas the Holy tree feels more like putting points for a few % here, a few % there, etc.
-No design promoting taking some points in other trees to reinforce your primary tree aside from Meditation. Druids among others get lots of talents where a lower talent in one tree also affects spells from another tree, like in the Balance tree affecting both some Resto and Balance spells. Mages get similar things with some Frost and Fire talents it seems. For priests, there is the requirement to spec into Discipline for Meditation, and the lower end of Disc is fairly universally useful since it is extremely generic. However, there is no talent in lower Holy which strengthens Shadow spells (Imp Renew somehow also benefiting one of the DoTs or so) or vice versa (not quite sure what talent to modify here, but you get the point)

Overall especially the Holy tree feels clunky, stale, and seems at times to take too many points for what it grants. I just find it frustrating looking at the much more synergistic, fun and streamlined Druid tree, which seems a great example of modern tree design whereas the Holy tree is still mostly stuck in 2004. I was looking into the Mage changes yesterday morning before the Priest ones were posted and noticed a lot of reduction in number of ranks without losing power, thinking we might finally get a similar thing for Priests, only to be disappointed again in that respect.

I also have some doubts about how Blizzard talent budgets work, given how Shadow Priests spend 5 points on 25% aggro reduction and 20% range increase when Balance got both topics rolled into a single talent granting 30% aggro reduction and 20% range for only 2 points. Similarly just looking at how Holy Specialization gives us 5% Holy crit, and comparing to what the new Fingers of Frost + Shatter do for Frostmages for the same 5 talent points. It gives them 15% chance to get 2 spells with 50% increased crit, which means on average it will be active for 30% of their nukes granting 50% extra critchance; an effective average gain of 15% crit. Considering how weak Holy Spec seems to be for example, and how many talent points it takes, it should be changed to 3 ranks of 2/4/6, or if Shatter/FoF is considered balanced maybe even 3/6/10% crit. At times I just get the feeling though that Blizzard doesn't look that much at the lower ends of our trees, and is mostly tweaking the higher and newer talents while other classes get more thorough revamps.

If you make Holy Spec 3/3, then what am I going to dump points in to get to the talents deeper in the tree?
Similarly, what do shadow pve priests put in disc tier 2?

In T2 disc, pve shadow priests usually take imp PW:F for buffing and imp PW:S for a tiny bit of survivability. Overall, the least worse fillers. Though, all sp will take Twin Disc in WotLK, and Unbreakable Will may hold a dps increase depending on the encounter, and thus be a better filler.

Unless you never take damage, why would you ditch healing focus ? And renew will not get better in expansion, but it is still a helpfull tool against foreseen burst, or any aoe cc.

How does that change things in any way? If anything this compounds the problem. SoL was without a doubt a very bad idea. Buff test of faith and IHC instead.

The only multi heal spell procing IHC is binding heal. And IHC is 2x30% hasted FH,GH,BHs on crit + 0.45% reduction in mana cost per crit point for a total of 6points. Illumination and light's grace is 0.6% reduction in mana cost per crit point and effectively permanent 25% haste on HL for 7 points only they are 4 tiers down the tree.


The value of crit for inspiration dies an ugly death after 15%.

The new holy conc may have added value to crit for holy, but it still makes it an awful stat for healing. We dont have divine aegis or ancestral awakening. This is effectively another nerf. Now we have to get a lot of crit to get the Holy conc proc rate, which means that to get the 9% level we have to sacrifice more spellpower and haste. The new SoL is just not well thought out, a free instant can't-crit FH on spell crit, is really only useful while leveling.

This was a really half-arsed sweep-under-the-rug attempt to solve the problem of holy having no value for crit. Its a complete failure IMO.

With a discipline priest in the raid I'm actually going to stop taking inspiration, I'm pretty sure a disc priest on his own can keep it up on the tank with penance ticking so fast.

At lvl80 my build will be like this: http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?prie...00000000000000

Where the questionable talents would be healing prayers or test of faith. I love test of faith as a talent but I'm not sure my mana can afford taking it at the start of WotLK, since I'm actually one of the few priests using PoH.

I wouldn't call it a failure yet. The proc chance can be changed, tying it to actually critting can be changed (as I said, I've posted a thread on the beta forums about this, and I keep forgetting to suggest it in-game but I'll do that sometime this weekend), and in practice the idea of having Holy Concentration's proc chance scaling with something isn't a terrible idea, especially if they don't want to just give us 10-15% clearcast proc rate.

As requested above, the regen formula for Int & Spi (self-only) is (at level 80):

and obviously the regen from Replenishment (which should be basically 100% up-time) is:

Improved Power Word: Fortitude and Improved Power Word: Shield is what I do, although some take martyrdom instead of the imp fort. My ideal shadow spec has 16 points in discipline:

5/5 twin disciplines
2/2 imp fort
3/3 imp shield
3/3 imp inner fire
3/3 meditation.

IIRC, imp inner fire is an additional static 54 spell power at 80, so the value of 3 points in that talent might be outweighed by something in the shadow tree depending on gear itemization down the road.

Now that you guys have a better grasp of gear what do you think our int and spirit levels will be at: when we first get to 80 (assuming we're already Sunwell kitted), when we complete heroics, when we complete Naxx-10 and when we complete Naxx-25?

My quick napkin-math assuming 1000 int and 1000 spirit shows an imp. spirit tap proc would increase our mp5 by 225 or so. But, using same math assuming we procced imp spirit tap and both +spirit trinkets stack (335, 300) it would increase our mp5 by 360 or so. Both of these are OFSR calculations and also I didn't currently bother to take into account SoR or Enlightenment.

Seems from a mana perspective, Imp. Spirit Tap seems damn awesome and gives us another use of crit. Of course, I also cede that we'd have to burn a gcd on swd (which may also put us into the FSR, but it depends on the situation).

Raid-buffed, when I step into Naxx(10) this weekend on the PTR, I will have 1100 spirit, 2000 spellpower, and ~ 9% haste.

When I step into Naxx(25) on Live (since I don't think we're going to make it to 25 people @ 80 in time on PTR), I expect to have slightly more spellpower (i.e. I'll actually have FtT instead of IDS), quite a bit more crit (moonkin aura, HO!), and slightly more haste (thanks again to the totem situation).

When I step out of Naxx(10), fully kitted, every drop I could possibly want, the stats I computed were:
1074 intellect
1292 spirit
2607 spellpower

(raid-buffed)

Note: this was before the trinket announcements, so I was using Sliver+Memento as my trinkets in the computation.